AJAX Puppy HQ

When I was a Teaching Assistant for Viking Code School, I built this very simple Rails API for students to use in their introduction to working with API’s using JavaScript. The idea was to give them an API they could access without dealing with authentication.

This seemed like a simple task on the surface, but enabling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) turned out to be a big challenge. In the process, I learned a ton about how browsers handle different types of requests and how to observe and debug the process using both the console and the network tab in the browser’s dev tools.